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What you haven't realised is that I sew to aid my thought processes. Look – needle – stab – stitch – thought. Needle – stab – stitch – thought. So next time you see a woman demurely sewing a sampler, be very, very wary. God knows what she may be planning.

Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was a social theorist who is often credited as being the first female sociologist. In Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing, Shelagh Stephenson depicts the great writer in a period of convalescence, living as an invalid by the sea in Tynemouth.

Shut off from her usual society, Harriet is visited by women of the locale; Impie, a recent widow who is using her new-found marital freedom to paint murals on the ceilings of her family home; Beulah, the daughter of a woman who'd been sold into slavery and escaped; and Jane, the housemaid, whose unfeted and unexpected gifts lift her out of domestic servitude and could help Harriet out of illness.

Harriet Martineau is a play about female self-reliance in a time of patriarchal dominance. Written by Shelagh Stephenson, it premiered at Live Theatre, Newcastle, in winter 2016.

Shelagh Stephenson was born in Northumberland and read drama at Manchester University. Her first stage play, The Memory of Water, premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 1996 and subsequently transferred to the West End, where it won an Olivier Award for Best Comedy in 2000. Her second play, An Experiment With An Air Pump, opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. It was joint recipient of the Peggy Ramsay Award and later transferred to the Hampstead Theatre. Both plays subsequently ran at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club. Her third play, Ancient Lights, was produced at Hampstead Theatre in December 2000. She has written several radio plays, including the award-winning Five Kinds of Silence, which she adapted for the stage and which was presented at the Lyric, Hammersmith in 2000. Her screen adaptation of The Memory of Water was released in spring 2002 with the title Before You Go.